Understanding Dialogue Data via Composition and Incrementally

Based on ideas of Firth and Harris, meanings of words can be represented using their distributions in large corpora of data. The principle of compositionality of Frege is then used to combine these and form meaning representations for sentences containing them. Most of our exchanges, however, happen in the context of dialogue, via split and incomplete utterances, while interacting with each other, and while interrupting each other and correcting one another. This project explores (1) how distributions of words can be transferred from corpora of grammatical text to corpora of dialogue data and (2) how the principle of compositionality can be applied to the words used in dialogical constructions to represent meanings of utterances that consist of them.
The project is done under co-supervision of Matt Purver and Julian Hough, with consultancy from Prof. Emeritus Ruth Kempson.